At 20:27 BST today the base-station of the WS3600 suffered another self-reset. This only lasted for 1 minute so it won't show up in the All Missing Data section of the crash log but I have added it to the Witnessed Events section.
File Under: WS3600, Weather Station, WS3600 Crash, WS3600 Reset.
The WS3600 base station crashed again today. Not like the reset I had the other day, this was a full crash and required a manual reset.
I've updated the crash log.
File Under: WS3600, Weather Station, Crash, WS3600 Crash.
At 12:07 BST today the base-station of the WS3600 suffered another self-reset. Prompted by this I've now created a page on the main site that keeps a record of all known resets and crashes.
File Under: WS3600, Weather Station, WS3600 Crash.
Further to yesterday's wind speed problem: at around 12:50 today the anemometer appears to have started working again.
Let's hope it was just a temporary glitch.
File Under: Weather Station, WS3600, Wind Speed.
Today, as of the time of writing, the WS3600 hasn't recorded a single instance of wind speed above 0mph (the last record was at 2006-07-17 20:17:06 BST with a wind speed of 0.2mph). This isn't so unusual, I've seen periods before when the wind speed has sat at 0 for a large part of the day before it finally picks up. To the best of my knowledge I've only once had a whole day of not recording any wind — and that was because of snow.
I knew the sky camera would come in handy. This morning, it managed to catch evidence of Rods flying around my own back garden! ;)
I've just added a new page of graphs to the weather site: the last 150 days. At the moment it only contains graphs for temperature, humidity, pressure and wind speed but I'll probably get round to expanding that at some point.
The graphs are updated daily, around local midnight.
File Under: WS3600, Weather Station, Graphs, Gnuplot.
So far the revived CloudCam seems to be working pretty well. I'm still doing the odd tweak here and there and sometimes the exposure isn't quite what it could be but it's a lot better than the last attempt at getting something like this working.
This morning a storm came over my location so, as a test, I've made this little video from the captured images:
Back in March of this year I had a play with setting up a CloudCam. In the end it didn't work out too well so I gave up on that setup.
Last night, after trying to revive the rain bucket, I decided to have another go at getting a CloudCam up and running. This time around I used an old Windows XP box and quickly wrote some code in Delphi to do the capture of images. I'm not considering it live yet (hence the fact that it's not on the menu of weather site yet) but CloudCam is up and running again – for the moment anyway.
Ever since the rain bucket died back in April I've been meaning to open it up and have a look inside to see if there were any obvious problems. As often happens, it was one of those little jobs that just kept being put off.
This evening I finally decided to pop the top off and have a look inside.
While searching for something totally unrelated today I stumbled on an interesting little image: a map showing average UK wind speeds. The map is part of the BWEA's wind speed database page.
File Under: UK, United Kingdom, Wind Speeds, Map.
Given that it directly relates to weather it seems sensible to post a pointer to this log entry on my astronomy site.
File Under: Atmospheric Phenomena.
I'm starting to think that the rain bucket had died. The bucket is in a less than ideal location, it's next to a building which will form a pretty good rain shadow so, often, a small shower or some light drizzle tends not to register. Because of this I'm used to getting no-rain readings when I might have expected something.
However, in the past 24 hours we've had a fair bit of rain and in the last hour we had a hell of a downpour (flooding in the road, drains not keeping up, that sort of thing) and nothing has shown on the WS3600.
On top of that, to try and be sure, I've just been outside and tipped the bucket by hand — I could feel and hear the rocker move but nothing has shown up on the base station. This would suggest that either something's wrong with the bucket, the cable or the main transmitter.
File Under: WS3600, Rain Bucket.
It seems my recent optimism was misplaced. At around 09:22 this morning the base station of the WS3600 crashed again. The usual thing happened, there was a beep, the backlight came on and every single part of the LCD display turned on. It didn't reset itself and I had to remove the power to cause a reset.
So, it seems that the solution isn't turning off DCF77 support and the recent long run of working without a problem has simply been good luck.
File Under: WS3600, DCF77.
Last Saturday was an interesting day from a weather watching point of view as I was witness to two different types of vortex.
Around noon that day, while walking around the village, I saw an unusual arc of cloud coming out of a bigger cloud. After watching it for a moment it seemed clear that the arc was, in fact, a rotating tube of cloud. A couple of other people who were with me watched and confirmed what I was seeing. We watched it for about five minutes as it "detached" itself from its parent cloud and head off on its own, finally appearing to "evaporate".
Later that day, probably some time around 18:40 BST, while driving up the A15 to Lincoln we drove into what appeared to be some sort of storm front. There was a very obvious line of cloud with rain falling from the leading edge and curving under the cloud. That was an impressive sight as it was. Then, as we got further under the cloud my wife pointed out an area of tight rotation within it. I had a look and could see it and commented that, if we were lucky, we might see a funnel cloud form. A friend in the car with us then pointed out that, under the area of rotation, dust was being picked up and spun around in the field below. We watched this for about 20 seconds as we drove past and then the movement in the field seemed to cease.
Sadly, in both cases, I didn't have any kind of camera with me and, in the latter case, I didn't think to note the exact time or location of the event. As best as I can recall I think it probably happened around here.
Annoyingly, at the moment, I can't find any online charts for the UK that show fronts and the like for around that time. My suspicion is that what we saw was a cold-core funnel cloud starting to form so it would be nice to check if there was a cold front in the area at the time.
File Under: Funnel Cloud, Vortex, Storm.
Tomorrow it'll be a month since I last had the base station crash. That's quite a significant period of time given that, before now, it was happening every couple of weeks or so.
So, what's changed?
Well, around the time of the last crash I was also having another problem with the base station: every so often the date and time would go way out — sometimes years into the future, other times years into the past. This seemed very odd given that the WS3600 uses DCF77 to keep the date and time correct. Suspecting that the problem was with the DCF77 update I decided to turn it off for a while and see what happens.
Since turning it off I've not had the date and time go wrong and I've not noticed a reset of the base station and I've not had a crash. This could be coincidence (and knowing my luck the bloody thing'll crash the moment I post this) but, so far, it's starting to look like these two issues might be related.
File Under: WS3600, DCF77.
Last Sunday, here in the UK, we turned our clocks forward an hour from GMT to BST. This was a bit of a significant event for my weather station setup because, when I first started work on the tools that would pull the data off it and present it on the website, I decided that local time (rather than Universal Time) would make more sense. For reasons I won't bore anyone with it was important that I selected one or the other as the primary method of dealing with time and given that weather data lends itself more to how we portion up our days local time was the choice that won.
There were a handful of minor problems, all of them were to do with presentation and, in each case, they were to do with the fact that I'd written some code that assumed UT rather than GMT/BST. As far as I can tell each of these issues is now dealt with and things are displaying correctly.
Of course, the real test will be the switch from BST to GMT. Skipping forward an hour is one thing, skipping backward an hour is quite different.
The bits I ordered a couple of days back have turned up. I just quickly stuck one of the propellers on the motor, wired it up to the solar panel and went outside while there was some sunlight about and.... it worked!
That's not to say it's going to solve my problem, but I could feel a breeze off the propeller so in the confined space of the shelter it might just make a difference.
I don't know when I'll get to actually work on this, and I need to figure out how best to hook it all up and how to site it in the shelter — and being the sort of person who knows very little about electrics and related matters it might take some time.
File Under: WS3600, Shelter, Temperature, Thermometer.
After this morning's apparent failure of the shelter to solve the temperature reading problem I got to thinking some more about how the problem can be solved. One option would be to have some sort of fan that would keep the air moving in the shelter — I don't know how well this would solve the problem but it's something that's got to be worth a try.
So, how to go about it? I guess the obvious solution would be a PC fan with a power supply and I'll probably look into that at some point. However, I've been looking for an excuse to order some fun things from MUTR so I had a quick look for some ideas on there. One little shopping trip later and I'm wondering how much fun can be had with a solar panel, a small motor, a polythene fan and a miniature impeller blade. I'll find out soon enough.
Heck, there's even a chance that mucking about with such toys will result in some sort of solution.
File Under: MUTR, WS3600, Solar Power.
